December 9, 2010

Open Letter to each Seattle School Director,

Joy Anderson et al. are dropping their appeal of the New Tech Network contract signed on April 7, 2010. This appeal is being discontinued largely because of three items.

(1).. The Board will not talk about issues in litigation. Now Board members can talk about this entire mess.

(2).. The State Attorney General will not investigate actions in current litigation. This is no longer in litigation so the Attorney General can now investigate the actions taken by the Superintendent, which we believe include the Class C Felony of Forgery.

(3).. If we were to win this NTN contract case, the District would likely appeal and drag this out another year just as has happened in the HS math adoption, which Porter et al. won on Feb 4, 2010. The District made no Math changes. The District’s appeal of Judge Spector’s math ruling will be heard in Appeals court sometime in 2011.

The Board is aware that the Superintendent lied to public officials but has taken no substantive action.

The Board is also aware of exactly how the NTN action report of 3-12-2010 was produced and again took no action. ⇒ …. This is not in litigation anymore, so Directors give us a statement and some action.

The Superintendent is quoted in the Seattle Times article “Seattle schools chief apologizes for false figure”:

In the future, she said, the district will make sure that all definitions of the numbers in its reports are "crystal clear." To that end, she said, the district wanted to make it clear that, in its new school reports, it measured test-score gains based on students' performance compared with their academic peers, not their past performance.

This statement is completely absurd. It measured absolutely nothing. Because of the way that this “supposed measure” was designed the performance of the students was completely irrelevant. The students were measured against a cohort of the bottom third of the students …. And no surprise 2/3 of the students did better than the bottom 1/3. It will happen that way every time with 66% of students reported as making gains no matter how poorly or how well the students do.

So there you have it. The lying is continuing. The deception is continuing.

The Board needs to fire the Superintendent with cause immediately.

There is NO confidence in the Superintendent and not much in the School Board either.

Director, please act now. This is more embarrassing by the day.

I can send you complete information on the forgery. I should receive my final Freedom of Information Act request from SPS legal affairs officer Ms. Joy Stevens in the next few days.

Sincerely,

Danaher M. Dempsey, Jr.


Reminder:
In your oath of office you swore to: “support the Constitution and Laws of the United States and the Constitution and Laws of the State of Washington, and will to the best of my judgment, skill and ability, truly, faithfully, diligently and impartially perform the duties of the office of Seattle School Director. …. So what is up with doing nothing about the crimes committed by the superintendent?